Sorry to hear about the recent ghoulishness. You’re not the first person to ask me about this – though you are the first to do it on what appears to be cardboard. Everything all right over there, Jim?

Anyway, here’s the deal.

Libraries are a little freaky because they are — haunted by the ghosts of wannabe writers.

Let me give you a moment for that to sink in.

Ready?

Okay, let’s keep going.

Every literary wannabe, at some time or another, sat in a library, looked around at all the great works that have been written over the years and thought… I can write stuff better than all of this!

And with that, they set off to… do nothing. For years. But then one day, it finally happened – they opened a word document and got to work on… well, some random thing that nobody ever read.

Fast forward a few years, the book is still unfinished, never to be published. The writer? Even though they never finished their book, they still hold to their idea that their book would have been better than anything else in the library.

So now that they’re floating around, all ghoulish and such, they haunt the library, making everyone feel creeped out, even though nothing seems to be happening.

But for what purpose? There is no purpose, only hurt feelings – just like most books.

Television is one of those funny things. It’s funny because so many people watch it, but don’t put too much thought into where it came from or why.

Let’s get to the bottom of the whole thing today.

Television was invented by pirates.

Sounds weird, right? But it’s not, when you think about it.

Look at the word television.

Now, look closer: TELEVISION.

Can you see it?

Let me explain by breaking the word into smaller pieces.

“Tele” comes from the ancient pirate word “telescope.” Pirates would use telescopes to look around them to find ships to rob or planets to discover… planets they hoped to one day be able to visit using spaceships (they later invented those, too) and rob, too.

“Visio” comes from more modern pirate word “smell-o-vision,” which describes what it’s like to look around the pirate ship and have difficulty seeing things because of all of the stink-lines coming off of the gross dudes.

“N” comes from the super-modern pirate word Nicetea, which the pirates prefer as their beverage. “That whole thing about rum has really been blown out of proportion,” says Jack Montague, dread pirate of the ship Constant Back-Pain.

So, now you understand the term, but not where the invention came from.

Pirates invented the television so that they could have something to watch on their long days, months, years, and lifetimes on the open sea. And it would have worked too, but… cable hadn’t been invented. And you try picking something up using those rabbit ears in a ship that’s being tossed around by the sea!

So, realizing that their invention was useless on the ocean, one pirate (Captain Magnavox) took to the land and began selling his invention in retail stores around the United States. “Frankly, it was a nice change of pace,” Captain Magnavox went on record for saying.

Now most programming isn’t geared to pirates, or about pirates. But some of it still is. And why? Because the television networks like to hark back to a time when the television game was simpler. And based solely on pirates.